Super News About Soup

Super News About Soup

(From Real Age tips)

If you choose soup when hunger strikes, you could be placing yourself on the path to weight loss.
In a yearlong study of overweight people on a reduced-calorie diet, snacking on soup each day led to more weight loss than noshing on a calorie-equivalent amount of energy-dense snack foods. The key difference: even though the soup and the high-energy snack had the same number of calories, the soup took up more space in people's bellies. Thus, the soup eaters felt less hungry later and ate less over the course of the day.

RealAge Benefit: Maintaining your weight and body mass index at a desirable level can make your RealAge as much as 6 years younger.

Snacking on foods that have a low ratio of calories to mass -- such as air-popped popcorn, vegetable broth-based soups, and fresh produce -- may help you eat fewer calories overall and aid weight loss efforts. When incorporating soup into your weight-reduction plan, steer clear of cream-based varieties, which are high in fat and calories. Instead, choose soups with a base of chicken broth or vegetable broth and those loaded with vegetables, kidney beans, lentils, or brown rice to keep you satisfied and help you trim down. In a study of overweight and obese people, those who ate two servings of low-energy dense soup per day as part of a reduced-calorie diet lost an average of almost 16 pounds over the yearlong study period. The people who ate two servings of high-energy dense snack foods per day lost an average of just over 10.5 pounds -- 35 percent less than the soup-snacking group.



Provision of foods differing in energy density affects long-term weight loss. Rolls, B. J., Roe, L. S., Beach, A. M., Kris-Etherton, P. M., Obesity Research 2005 Jun;13(6):1052-1060.